The Death of the CIA “Honeypot” Theory of the Julian Assange Rape Allegations

The “honeypot” explanation for the rape allegations against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange — the theory that his accusers had been CIA plants, recruited for the purpose of seducing him and crying rape — was always a weird one.

The whole thing had a bit of an Ian Fleming vibe, for starters. The one accuser’s supposed links to the CIA turned out to be embarrassingly tenuous. And then there was the problem of the scripting — if these women had been sent to lie, why wouldn’t they have been sent with a simpler, cleaner lie? Why not claim rapes that would be immediately understood by all as rapes, rather than assaults that would themselves become the subject of heated dispute?

The stories circulated, though, as stories do, and they wound up getting passed along by some pretty prominent people. One of Assange’s lawyers speculated that they might be true. Bianca Jagger tweeted about it all — and was notoriously retweeted by Keith Olbermann.

But now Assange has come out with his own explanation for the charges, and he dismisses the honeypot theory — which he calls “that kind of classic Russian-Moscow thing” — as “not probable.” (He claims that the women who accused him were in a “tizzy” because of STD fears, and were “bamboozled” by police, for what that’s worth. He also suggests that his lawyer was misquoted.)

Regarding the honey-pot theory: [Ms. A] made four trips to Cuba to study the viability of various “independent” political parties for ‘regime change scenarios”. She was escorted around the country by a CIA-funded and promoted group called “Women in White”. That is an astounding coincidence. I read the thesis. You should too.

Considering Assange has NEVER faced accusations before in his life of abusing women, the strange coincidence that he is now facing smears related to two women, who happen to be good friends, and one of whom has done intelligence gathering of a VERY particular sort in Cuba — well, sorry — context matters.

Angus Johnston, I’m tempted to pity you for having these kinds of illogical commenters on your site! Anyway, thank you for your patience. Thank you. I’m glad to have found you and studentactivism.net this week.

Your posts on this entire matter are a little alarming to me. Regardless of what actually transpired between Assange and his accusers, this strikes me as a particularly dangerous moment in world history to minimize the multifarious ways in which intelligence agencies have intervened in progressive social movements over the past 60 years. Unfortunately, so much as discussing said history, tends to elicit a sort of pavlovian – “nutty … conspiracy theorist … tune-out now” response from many people who really ought to know better. And your quick dismissal of such themes and questions, apparently as a way to support a perversely over-simplified interpretation of the whole Assange matter, really stinks.

You do realize that Ian Fleming worked in military intelligence during the cold war, right? Hence that “vibe” shouldn’t necessarily evoke a sense of fiction. And that, at the very least, certain highly influential feminists did collaborate with the CIA during the mid-cold-war, even if the extent of that collaboration remains unclear?

Why in the world, after all that has happened with civil liberties / surveillance / the war machine during the past decade are you comfortable to treat the possibility of similar influence in this situation so lightly? Abuses of power by the state are no less fundamental to feminism, in the big picture, than are questions of sexual violence.

I don’t deny the nefarious role that intelligence agencies and governments more generally have played in recent history, Nic. Ask me about how the FBI tried to blackmail Martin Luther King into committing suicide, and I’ll bend your ear for hours. Hell, I wrote my doctoral dissertation on a group that was secretly funded and manipulated by the CIA.

But I just don’t buy it in this instance. I’m entirely ready to believe that the US government is manipulating the prosecution of Assange, but no, I just don’t buy that the two women accusing him were on anybody’s clandestine payroll when they went to bed with him. It just doesn’t hang together.

Its precisely that historical ghettoization of said nefarious histories that concerns me – ie MLK / FBI yes but Assange / CIA = spy novel. IOW – this set of events has given me the distinct impression that many self-proclaimed progressive activists genuinely seem to believe things like shady intel agency business is but a historical curio. I find this infuriating because it forecloses on building alliances between progressives and libertarians around such questions of civil liberties / techno-surveillance et al. Given what I think Naomi Wolf has been doing over the past few years towards this end, I am deeply troubled to see her become a polarizing rather than mind-expanding figure in this scenario. I think that her position makes a great deal more sense in the context of her recent work, rather than just the Beauty Myth, etc. Basically I suspect that we are missing the possibility, yet again, for instigating a very powerful social movement that would hinge on pretty radical left/right coalition building. And I find it untenable, personally, to think that the larger question of government/prosecutorial misconduct (which is what I think is going on here, rather than a “honeypot” per se) can somehow be successfully bracketed in order to allow a more general discussion of sexual violence and consent, in *this* instance. Either way – thanks for the reasonable response.

I don’t think people are doubting anything about the reach or intentions of state intelligence agencies, be it America’s or any other. The point many are making is that the person who initiated much of the oft-repeated speculation about CIA ties in this particular case had to string together very flimsy and unconvincing evidence and then strain to concoct an argument. Not to mention he’s a Holocaust denier and a known ass.

For the record, Nic, I’m happy to bracket either question in order to allow a more general discussion of the other. I think we can discuss one thing one day and another thing another, one thing one one site and another on a different one.

Arkay, for me the biggest cause for doubt is the nature of the allegations themselves. If someone was setting out to put Assange on the hook for a sex crime, why wouldn’t they choose a crime that would more reliably alienate his supporters? Stash some child porn in his house, for instance, or claim a more traditionally “acceptable” rape.

I don’t know one way or another what the “real story” behind the accuser in question is. I do know that the US intelligence budget strongly supports the idea that we still have more than a few operatives around the world and that, in a broad sense, Lefty organizers have historically been targets of recruitment for intelligence work. That may well not be the case here. But nor is it simply the stuff of spy novels.

@Angus – because that would have been preposterously unbelievable. Is it not possible that intel agencies sometimes work similarly to your average high power advertising or political consulting firm? That, hypothetically speaking, this situation could have been constructed just as carefully as Karl Rove’s latest campaign to secure soccer mom’s or some other demographic? It seems crystal clear that one of the outcomes of these events has been to dramatically polarize progressives. Should it be considered paranoid to consider if that’s the result of a careful script? I don’t think so.

Nic, I agree that the child porn thing would have been too on the nose. But honestly, though I respect your soccer mom argument, it doesn’t ring true to me. I will say, though, that I agree 100% with your previous comment.

Jesse Jane, you can find comments from high-up Wikileaks workers who actually know all three parties involved in this that the whole argument that one of these accusers was a CIA plant is complete and utter bullshit. It’s funny: the closer one is to Wikileaks, to actually knowing people involved or doing the work involved, the more likely they are to say this is not in any way some honeytrap operation.

You are vigorously arguing for the tenuous conclusions of a Holocaust denier. Think about that.

@arkay – Israel Shamir is hardly the progenitor of the suggestion that Assange may have been set up by an intelligence agency. Many have argued for these events to be an opportunity to “raise the bar” on issues of sexual violence. Perhaps they also present an (admittedly less substantial but still important) opportunity to investigate how the charge of anti-semitism is used as a dismissive political strategy.

Brandon Darby had pretty good references, too. He spoke the lingo, and found himself essentially directing Common Ground in Nola.

Again, read the thesis.

The situation is pretty much as Michael Moore relayed on Rachel Maddow’s show. Rape accusations should be taken seriously (when ‘rape’ is actually alleged by a woman, which in point of fact it was NOT in this case). If Assange cast doubt on [Ms. A], after working with her and sleeping with her, that would be taken as “blaming the victim”. Which is (of course) very bad behavior.

But since the discussion of consent as a general principle, whether “no means no” is good enough or if consent is required in notarized, written, triplicate; and related discussion of how people are smeared have been raised:

It is not a mere coincidence that a man who has never in his life been accused of mistreating women is accused (by the swedish state, not the women themselves) of rape twice in one week — which jailed him, and now has him confined to a country estate wearing an electronic bracelet. That every article now says “Julian Assange, accused rapist” etc.

That’s a CLASSIC smear campaign, and side notes like the actual writing of [Ms. A] have REAL bearing. It’s not proof she’s a “cia agent” — but it is a very particular, and not good, kind of investigation she was involved in Cuba. You should read it. At the very least, it speaks to poor judgment and skewed politics. At worst, it establishes a history of working in conjunction with US intelligence.

I’m not an Assange “defender”. I don’t even know what his politics are, truth be told. Except that he has become the subject of a vicious smear campaign to delegitimize his work to expose massive US government duplicity.

Don’t believe in sexual smear campaigns? Ask Jean Seberg, and then call those who thought FBI dirty tricks were used as “paranoid”.

I’m finishing the last book in the Millennium Trilogy over the holidays. All this makes me thing Stieg should have written the book with Säpo as the good guys, the investigative journalist as the abuser and Lisbeth Salander as a woman too timid to say “no”. That would no doubt please the fools who think the “antioch rules” are “feminist” instead of trivializing rape (which they certainly did by infantalizing women).

If the women approached the police only to request Assange be tested for HIV and it was the police who suggested filing assault charges, we do seem to know that neither woman felt she had been raped.

We seem to have pretty hard evidence that the entire suggestion of rape or assault came from the state, from square one. I am confused as to why this is not taken as proof positive that these charges were created, at square one, by agents of the state?

Further, this seems to hurt future allegations of sexual violence in the following way:

The accusation of rape seems to come from people other than these women reaching their own conclusions about the events recorded in their statements (being held down, having penetration initiated during sleep) and not either party’s own assessment of those events.

Thus if outside parties are the one’s to determine whether or not rape took place by *interpreting* the events, then the corollary interpretation is also validated. That is to say in a different circumstance, a woman who felt she had been raped by psychological intimidation etc. but could not point to some event ala being held down, could be told she had not been raped.

This reminds me of Jaclyn Friedman stating her assumption of one accuser – that “she was afraid” about the accuser who had been held down. Obviously this is possible but stating it as JF did is identical to the police deciding that a given set of events objectively constitutes rape despite the accuser not feeling it did.

This seems like super dangerous territory, if only for the potential future ramifications (ie the corollary described above).

If the women approached the police only to request Assange be tested for HIV and it was the police who suggested filing assault charges, we do seem to know that neither woman felt she had been raped.

Well, no, we don’t know that. Most women who have been raped don’t file charges, so not filing charges is not evidence that you don’t consider an act rape.

We don’t know very much at all about how either of these women saw the events at the time, or how they interpret them now. I think it’s best to avoid speculating.

And no, I don’t see the slippery slope potential you do. If we define rape by objective criteria — if we have a standard as to what “counts” as rape, whatever that standard may be — then there will always be people whose own understanding of events is contradicted by that definition. It’s inevitable, and it’s inevitable in both directions.

Finally, yes, I agree that Jaclyn Friedman should have been more conditional in that one statement. But if you change “she was afraid” to “she may well have been afraid,” her larger point survives intact.

That was not JF’s only insufficiently conditional statement. She also said ” If you initiate sex with a sleeping person you are sexually assaulting them. And that is perfectly clear.” I can think of more than a few circumstances in which the statement is untrue. Her performance was, despite best intent, IMHO and for whatever reason, rather clouded by a series of such problematically singular axioms.

I think I simply see the sum total of the information I have obtained differently than you. But I am always immensely grateful when internet debate doesn’t degenerate into bullsh*t. So thanks! ( and glad I discovered this blog – great material.)

The use of axioms is an interesting issue. I am not familiar with Friedman beyond that appearance with Naomi Wolf. Using the magical powers of Google, I came up with other appearances and notes that didn’t seem as problematic, and which also didn’t put her in the league to go toe-to-toe with Naomi Wolf. By insisting on rigid, legal and state-backed arbitration for matters that are anything but clear, on a very basic level what Friedman was advocating, “affirmative consent”, it’s just dangerous to people. Her shock that someone disagreed took me back to college days, definitely pushing my buttons about a whole way of approaching issues that was popular among some ‘activists’ but didn’t travel an inch beyond their circles.

Wolf’s insistence on moral adulthood, and the facts as best we know them, was an excellent counter-example. Without beating up on Friedman, I hope very much she realizes the damage her position does, thinks it through and exercises her own moral adulthood to change her approach.

I could not agree more strongly with your take on each count above. Though I find it infuriating that this scenario seems to have raised the sort of collective ire that inhibits effective communication – meaning that your assessment of JF and NW being of different leagues seems very likely to draw indignant accusations of bias and thoughtlessness. I see it as a point of strength that NW’s position integrated both her progressive and feminist philosophies whereas JF’s claim that she would be “on the front lines” protesting extradition to the US seemed like an afterthought that did not mesh with her seeming unwillingness to incorporate the complexity of the situation into her read of the narrative itself. Affirmative consent as stated by JF seems so deeply at odds with the richness, complexity and inherent ambiguity of probably most sexuality that I can only assume the person stating it is speaking from a place of, well, again, Axiom rather than experience.

I remain unable to understand how Wolf was making a stand for moral adulthood by defending a man’s right to penetrate an unconscious woman against her express wishes. I am open to accepting that Friedman’s shock and tone may have made her seem in some ways like a college activist — she did to me as well in some ways — but Wolf genuinely did not have the most cogent argument, nor one most conversant with the facts of the case as we know them. Wolf had to contort what is known in order to make her points and truly ended up coming off, to me, as someone who could genuinely not reconcile her suspicion of state motives and support for Assange and Wikileaks with the possibility that he could be a flawed individual with difficulties respecting the boundaries of his sexual partners. These are not things an adult should have trouble holding in his or her head at once. This is a difficult case because of the issue of state intervention and political motives but if you cannot argue that without disingenuous arguments you should perhaps cede the mantle of feminist public intellectual to another.

Wolf’s point that consent was negotiated again was as specious as an argument about consent can possibly get. Assange may not even be charged or may have not done any of these things, but if the allegations were true the fourth count is a very clear case of violating all terms of that negotiated consent. Again, it has been a very long time since I’ve seen a public intellectual twist facts so disingenuously, and Friedman’s manner and possibly poor response to this doesn’t change that for me.

These allegations paint a portrait of moral adulthood on the part of the alleged victim in question, in which she allegedly said she would not engage in intercourse without a condom and negotiated with Assange over this, saying no unless conditions were met. Assange is then alleged to have ignored her clear “no” by penetrating her without a condom and against her express wishes and her earlier refusals — and to have waited to do it while she was asleep or half asleep.

Regardless of what the state chose to do, I just can’t comprehend how Wolf’s contortion of the facts represents a stand for moral adulthood. One party is alleged to have negotiated consent in all the ways Wolf extols; the other is alleged to have ignored his partner’s explicit terms.

On a purely ethical level, Wolf was arguing for a man’s right to penetrate a person against her express wishes, saying that if the woman gives in once that boundary has been crossed no violation has taken place, and I find that to be the opposite of moral adulthood. I expect far better from grown-ups and am frankly horrified by any standard in which someone can defy my wishes about what can and can be done to my body and consider that defiance part of a “negotiation.”

@arkay – I think the corollary argument to yours about Wolf’s purported inability to hold two disparate truths in her mind is that many people strongly arguing this is clearly an instance of rape are unable to hold in their own minds the disparate truths that 1) sexual violence is epidemic and it’s very often prohibitively difficult for women to achieve successful prosecution in scenarios where consent is deemed at all ambiguous but 2) the events described here sound pretty unpleasant and kind of dark but really don’t sound like rape.

I’m not necessarily interested in making that case but I think its just as well founded as the argument you are making about Wolf’s psychology.

FWIW I am not interested in defending Assange as an individual; only of promoting the viewpoint that police/intelligence manipulation in events involving him could well be alot more sophisticated than just carrying out some sort of classic “honeypot” characteristic of the cold war intel agencies.

Market research and narrative-shaping has grown infinitely more sophisticated in the past three decades and perhaps, on the example of the political consulting and advertising industries, we would do well to recognize that the intel agencies’ manipulation of actual events to influence popular opinion towards political goals may be much more complex and nuanced than it once was.

Nic, Jesse, there may be important conversations to be had about the murkier aspects of the claims against Assange, but those conversations simply cannot take place until the parties reach consensus on one fact:

If you try to have sex with someone without a condom, and she says no, and you try again, and she says no again, and then you penetrate her without a condom in her sleep, that’s rape.

Set aside everything else. Set aside whether she later says it’s okay. Set aside whether what I just described is a full and accurate description of what happened, or what is alleged to have happened, between Assange and W. Set all that aside, and concentrate solely on the passage above.

If you agree that the scenario I have laid out is rape, we can move on from there. If you don’t, we can’t, because we have a fundamental difference on what rape is.

You can’t set aside that when you get up in the morning, get back into bed, begin sex “half asleep” quote unquote, then discuss continuing sex — that is definitely, 100% not rape. Sorry, but if you think some guy should go to prison for 10 year and be smeared as a rapist for life, you need to think your parameters through again.

If a woman forgets to take her pill, then has sex with her partner without informing him — that’s bad behavior, but it is not rape.

Jesse, again. We’re not talking about Assange right now. We’re talking about the principle.

Person A and person B are in bed. A wants to have sex without a condom. B says no. A persists. B says no again. B falls asleep. A enters B while B is sleeping without using a condom.

Set aside what the punishment should be. Is that sex act one that has been consented to by both parties? No. Obviously not. It’s one that has been imposed on one party by the other against her stated wishes. That’s rape.

“I think the corollary argument to yours about Wolf’s purported inability to hold two disparate truths in her mind is that many people strongly arguing this is clearly an instance of rape are unable to hold in their own minds the disparate truths that 1) sexual violence is epidemic and it’s very often prohibitively difficult for women to achieve successful prosecution in scenarios where consent is deemed at all ambiguous but 2) the events described here sound pretty unpleasant and kind of dark but really don’t sound like rape. ”

Is not a corollary argument at all. I apologize for going into psychological motives I can’t know but this does not make the events described here not sound like rape. There is one element of this that in this case, in any other case, in a hypothetical situation or in a work of fiction is rape, is rape by its very definition, and I refuse to let the oddities of this particular case allow us to cede that ground, which progressives and feminists have fought very hard for, and which Wolf herself has stood on many times in her career.

If you are not invested in defensing Assange as an individual or truly making or standing behind that corollary argument, then it is not necessary to cede that ground in this case. Or at all, ever, because I don’t know what case could possibly so important or so hard to argue that it would necessitate abandoning the definition of rape. Nothing about the state intervention in this case makes rape not rape, and I continue to be amazed that so many I otherwise agree with can’t make a good argument without including this thoroughly regressive sell-out of hard-won human rights.

“You can’t set aside that when you get up in the morning, get back into bed, begin sex “half asleep” quote unquote, then discuss continuing sex — that is definitely, 100% not rape. Sorry, but if you think some guy should go to prison for 10 year and be smeared as a rapist for life, you need to think your parameters through again.”

I keep asking people again and again why they must twist the facts of this case in order to make their points, and here you are twisting the facts of this case as “beginning sex” and then discussing continuing sex. Regardless of whether what is alleged is what happened, what is alleged is that one individual actually penetrated another against her express and vigorously negotiated conditions. This is not “beginning sex” as if he is making advances, kissing her, initiating some kind of mutual interaction; this is a man penetrating her against her known wishes and conditions and doing it without asking, as she is alleged to have awoken to him penetrating her.

Asleep or half asleep doesn’t really matter if what we’re talking about is one individual beginning an act of penetration against the other’s known wishes, and without consultation.

“If a woman forgets to take her pill, then has sex with her partner without informing him — that’s bad behavior, but it is not rape.”

That’s not a directly equivalent hypothetical to the hypothetical we’re discussing.

No, I have not said I don’t consider it rape. I just want to know what B thinks and how she defines her own experience. I’m also trying to not pass judgment on a hypothetical situation that seems very cut and dry because it seems to be a heuristic tool that can be mirrored back onto a situation I think is not cut and dry. That strategy implies a philosophy I reject. More importantly I don’t know how B felt about the events. Did the events above end with B saying to A, “ugh you’re fucking pathetic, go home?” or did she feel frightened, traumatized and violated. On a practical level if B felt she had some degree of comfort and agency in the situation, and did not feel sexually assaulted, nothing is gained by calling it rape. Though I do agree that, legally, what you have described almost surely offers grounds for a rape charge, if B felt it was.

“So are you arguing that he raped her for a period of time, stopped raping her at her request, and she then decided to have sex with him after some period of time, later?”

I am saying that I have no idea what actually happened, only that the allegations as we know them, and the timeline as we’ve been given — whether any of it actually happened — contains a clear instance of rape.

“I’m also trying to not pass judgment on a hypothetical situation that seems very cut and dry because it seems to be a heuristic tool that can be mirrored back onto a situation I think is not cut and dry. That strategy implies a philosophy I reject.”

And I would suggest this is a serious cop-out following your statement that “the events described here sound pretty unpleasant and kind of dark but really don’t sound like rape.”

All I am saying is that non-consensual sexual acts are rape, and that it is not necessary to cede that ground in order to defend Assange against state actors. In fact, I’d say it is a dangerous path to take. What the individual ended up believing doesn’t really matter if the core of what you’re arguing for is that there can be instances in which defying someone’s express wishes about what can and can’t be done with his or her body, and doing it while the person is unconscious or not fully conscious, is not rape.

A person can be raped and not consider it rape — this happens often in marital rape. I am not talking about how any given state chooses to define rape or anything relating to state intervention; my interest is in the definition of the term and the idea of consent as a core human right. I don’t believe in setting an ethical standard based on how someone feels about a clear violation of basic boundaries. and again would suggest that is a dangerous path as well.

“So are you arguing that he raped her for a period of time, stopped raping her at her request, and she then decided to have sex with him after some period of time, later?”

I would argue that the act of penetrating someone knowingly against their wishes when they are asleep is rape, and that you can’t selectively define rape as something that is defined not by the act than by the reaction to the act if you’re not prepared to do that in other matters of human ethics and behavior as well.

A person giving in to someone’s severe ethical violation does not make it something other than a violation, it makes her acquiescence coerced in a pretty unimaginable way. The act is the act. And yes, someone can be raped by a lover and continue to have consensual sex with that person later. Rape is a definition of the act itself.

Try to apply this standard you’re setting up to any other violation and see if it works.

I genuinely feel you are making an appeal to a deceptive simplicity that, IMHO, is actually a rather strong statement about whether relationships are actively negotiated relationally between individuals or by reference to a set of codes arbitrated by some sort of body of power.

I would suggest you try this experiment – communicate the same sentiment without the word “rape.” IE A person can [participate in a sexual act without their consent] and believe that they gave consent? A person can be [forced to engage in a sexual act] and not believe they were forced? A person’s body can be [penetrated against their will] and they can believe it was not against their will?

This amounts to saying: a person may be wrong about their own experience. While this may describe someone who does not understand their legal or human rights to offer or deny consent, it should not apply to whether or not a person gets to define and understand the ethics of their own body and boundaries. If someone initiated sex with me in my sleep, I then woke, asked them to stop and then decided to have sex with them after all, I would be utterly incensed to be told I had been raped. Period. And you or anyone else claiming the right to declare the ethical nature of that process of negotiation is 100% not a step towards the preservation and protection of human rights.

I do, of course, agree that people can be misled to believe they have an obligation to offer their body and sexuality in order to fulfill a contract. This might apply as well to human trafficking as to marital rape. Both are problems in which someone has been led to believe that, due to a contractual obligation, their right to consent (regardless how it might be derived) has been forfeited. That is to say – you cannot equate a person in the A/B scenario above who does not consider herself to have been raped with someone who has been raped in a marriage because she believes she does not have the human right to deny consent to her spouse.

If a person penetrates someone else in their sleep against their wishes (and again, I do believe that asleep/half-asleep tell two very different stories), then yes, a violation of boundaries has taken place. The significance of that violation is a reflection on the sum total picture of the earlier negotiation of consent such that I think only the offended party could possibly be the one to decide the extent thereof. But the violation of boundaries does not always amount to rape. If the person being penetrated, at that point, decides he/she has been raped, I have no reason to disbelieve them. But if he/she feels she successfully evaded a greater assault and chooses to frame his/her experience in terms of almost being raped, or if the violation felt to that person to be something else entirely etc, I also have no reason to disbelieve them.

Let that read “If someone penetrated me in my sleep” rather than “initiated sex with me in my sleep” in the 3rd paragraph since that difference has been contentious elsewhere and the meaning of my point is the same either way.

Explain again how acting on someone else’s body without consulting them — asleep or half asleep, the issue is that there was allegedly no consultation, no negotiation, just one individual acting on the other against that person’s well-articulated wishes — has anything to do with anything being actively negotiated relationally between individuals. Until that point is resolved I can’t go forward. I am not talking about codes or bodies of power; I am talking about the ethics of interpersonal relations here. Again, I ask you to consider the ethical standard you’re setting up with regard to body autonomy.

Years ago, Nic, when I was in college, I got into a public argument with my then-girlfriend. I said something she really didn’t like, and she slapped me in the face. Hard.

Last night I was talking to her on the phone about the discussions that have been taking place recently on the site (we’re still very close friends), and that incident came up. We talked about it a little, and she and I both agreed that what she did that day was assault. As a legal matter, it was assault. I wasn’t ever going to call the cops on her, and if I did, there’s very little chance she would have been arrested. We were friends before, and we’ve stayed friends since. It wasn’t a horrible traumatic experience in my life.

But it was still assault. She broke the law. You can’t just going around hitting people.

It was assault, and it was always assault. I never thought of it as assault until last night, but it didn’t become assault last night, because assault is assault.

And I feel the same way about the A and B hypothetical. Whether A’s act of entering her in her sleep in violation of her expressed wishes is later forgiven or acceded to changes nothing about the original act — it’s sexual assault. And even if she does forgive him, even if she does accede, even if somehow she’s changed her mind in the middle of the night and decided she wanted it, it’s still a really useful thing for A to be told that it’s assault.

If I were a friend of A’s, and he told me a story like this, and it had a not-horrible ending in which everything turned out okay and comfortable for everyone involved, the first thing I’d say to him is this:

“Dude, you know that’s sexual assault, right?”

Because it is. Even if he gets permission later. It’s still an act of assault. It’s still a gross moral violation, and it’s still a crime.

You can’t just go around hitting people, even if they forgive you later.

I’ve called the hypothetical situation redolent of sexually predatory behavior, said it clearly indicates a boundary violation, said it probably constitutes legal grounds for rape and said that if the individual feels she was raped, I would believe her, etc. I have only stopped short of saying – this set of circumstances can be objectively defined as always and evertime a completed event of rape based on some essential, universal criteria *even if* that is at odds with the offended person’s own reasonable opinion of the experience (ie based on good information about consent as a human right, not through brainwashing, being of sound mind etc).

I neither believe nor am I suggesting that retroactive consent is valid, either legally or ethically. If something I said “suggests” that, it is a finer point demanding more specific exploration.

I am confident my larger point has been stated as clearly as I am capable of doing – that an individual (presuming reasonable education and health, etc) is always a better judge of his/her experience than the state.

And yes I am (ever so somehow wildly irresponsibly) suggesting that, situations being unique, there may well be instances in which the status of initiating penetration with a half-or-un-conscious person may hover between rape and a-serious-boundary-violation-very-often-likely-to-lead-to-rape. But I think it is simply a falsehood to pretend that *any* semantic term (in this case “penetration” for example) could be so precisely and effectively defined that it should take precedence over an individidual’s report of their own experience.

Nic, you’ve had the bad luck to come to this site in the wake of an invasion of rape denialists and apologists, and so some of your ambiguous statements have wound up being seen through that lens. I apologize for that.

Having said that, I think we’ve each shed about as much light here as we’re going to shed, and I’m happy to end this conversation amicably.

In fairness, it is not bad luck – my commentary is definitely motivated by a specific subset of the #mooreandme discourse, so I take full responsibility for getting myself into a certain conversation. I do appreciate that exchange very much and think it is a particularly important thing these days when dissenting opinions are publicly expressed with civility and honorable discourse. Best.

I am also done with this conversation, and I don’t really know why I got into it in the first place, as my initial reaction to the restating of well-known histories and narratives about intelligence agencies and the American state apparatus as though any one here could be expected to *not* know these things, or must be educated in them, was annoyance at the overwhelming condescension. It just got worse from there.

Nic, you are arguing an intellectually and ethically unsound position and I really must ask you to consider the consequences of that. I would also like to quote this bit of a Melissa McEwan essay:

“There are the occasions that men—intellectual men, clever men, engaged men—insist on playing devil’s advocate, desirous of a debate on some aspect of feminist theory or reproductive rights or some other subject generally filed under the heading: Women’s Issues. These intellectual, clever, engaged men want to endlessly probe my argument for weaknesses, want to wrestle over details, want to argue just for fun—and they wonder, these intellectual, clever, engaged men, why my voice keeps raising and why my face is flushed and why, after an hour of fighting my corner, hot tears burn the corners of my eyes. Why do you have to take this stuff so personally? ask the intellectual, clever, and engaged men, who have never considered that the content of the abstract exercise that’s so much fun for them is the stuff of my life.”

Arkay, I find your reasoning and, particularly, your presumptions both literally appalling and very telling in terms of where you seem to be coming from. I need to settle down a bit before I respond but very much hope you will check back in order to hear what I have to say given that you claim to have departed with a pretty scathing and highly provocative criticism of me individually. I ask Angus, respectfully, to keep this thread open long enough for that to happen. Thanks.

I will not be marginalized into your depiction of an antiquated parlor game between combatting binary male/female archetypes. I’m a f-ing rape survivor. Do you even have a clue that men are also the victims of sexual violence? That resources for men are absolutely paltry, basically nil compared to the resources for women? That the culture for us is really really unwelcoming, etc?

Or are you actually comfortable to vocally claim that a man who obviously strongly disagrees with you but is really trying to make his position clearly simply must be dealing in abstractions far removed from life? Because I’m about 99% sure that you just marginalized me halfway to Mars. Kindly, I really hope you hear that at least this once your presumptions about a stranger on the internet were really hurtful.

I did not get caught up in this conversation due to some sort of intellectual curiosity. I am arguing tooth and nail for what has proved far and away the most crucial tool for my own survival – to be allowed to tell my own history and to have my communication of my own experience respected.

I refrained from calling your position intellectually and morally unsound, though I think it is.

“Do you even have a clue that men are also the victims of sexual violence?”

This is what I’m talking about re: condescension and painting others’ positions as something other than they are. The fact that you would even think I am callous to this or unaware of these very basic and very vital things has been very irksome to me, and I am sorry but your positions do remain intellectually and ethically unsound and cannot be argued without a bunch of frills. And things like “very telling” are no more even-handed than is my saying your ideas are unsound, which is, at least, about ideas an not a matter of declaring your motives or ideology suspect.

I quoted Melissa McEwan because that paragraph sums up how these kinds of lofty discussions that chip away at foundational feminist thought make me feel. You are welcome to take that as some sort of personal dig at you or to respond with suggestions that I am arguing from some place I am not or have motives I don’t, but your response (hey look what I did there!) does not make my act (!) anything other than what it was: an expression of how I feel when reading these truly bankrupt arguments.

I did not “marginalize you halfway to Mars.” I quoted something that expresses better than I can how this conversation makes me feel. And nothing I’ve said has been in defiance of my own belief in survivor-driven response. It has been in defense of a very basic human rights idea that I will not cede ground on or muddy for the purposes of semantics. This is about defending the idea of body autonomy, not about telling survivors how they must think about what happened to them, nor what they should call it. It’s about *preventing* rape, and it is *absolutely* unsound and troublesome to argue, in a world in which rape is so prevalent, that doing something to another’s body against their wishes and will can be something other than what it is because of how the acted-on party receives it. This is basically creating a framework that makes the cultural practice of “victim blaming” into a defensible position.

“@arkay – Israel Shamir is hardly the progenitor of the suggestion that Assange may have been set up by an intelligence agency. Many have argued for these events to be an opportunity to “raise the bar” on issues of sexual violence. Perhaps they also present an (admittedly less substantial but still important) opportunity to investigate how the charge of anti-semitism is used as a dismissive political strategy.”

I re-read this statement several times when you first threw out an accusation of “condescension.” Now I’ve re-read it again. I do not see how any reasonable person could interpret it as such.

And I am confident it will be clear to any neutral reader that my rhetorical statement to you about men and sexual violence is but a reflection on my frustration immediately following a post by you that I reasonably interpreted as an assault on my motivations.

You are welcome to take that quote as an assault on my motivations, but that does not make it something other than a quote expressing my frustration with these intellectual discussions that at the core just dismantle hard-fought feminist ideas that exist to protect us, men and women, from trauma and dehumanization. You are interpreting it differently than it was meant.

By condescension I’m talking largely about responses to Angus, not to me. But I did find your response condescending, as though *I myself* or any lefist/radical/anarchist/insert ideology here would not have considered the very obvious employment of state power in this case. My response about specific arguments was about specific arguments that Shamir unleashed onto the internet.

I agreed with a lot of your other early points about the efficacy of using this instance to discuss consent, but considering that people like yourself have been forcing that conversation by behaving as though now is the time to start chipping away at ideas meant to bolster basic body autonomy as a human right, such a conversation is inevitable. I really wish we weren’t having it. I can’t *help* but have it when I see intelligent people saying some of the kinds of things you’re saying here, or arguing that Naomi Wolf’s patently obvious intellectual contortions were somehow admirable. I have no position on Wolf one way or the other but can’t even fathom how you could receive her odd arguments about how consent was negotiated again and again to be anything but desperate, frantic semantics. I cannot throw out intellectual rigor here to start arguing inanities just because there are real questions of state intervention at hand.

Because what we are arguing is not just about this case, and your positions ultimately chip away at body autonomy being a meaningful idea.

One thought. Nic is right, in my view, that justice demands that we hear and respect each “individidual’s report of their own experience.” But by the same token, Arkay is right that we have a concomitant obligation to make our own independent assessments of the events they describe.

We cannot cede our obligation to try to make sense of the world to anyone on the basis of their personal “authority” any more than we can on the basis of their institutional authority. But at the same time, we must conduct our own sense-making in a way that respects the fact that others — others much more close to the situations we’re trying to make sense of, others with much more of an immediate stake in those situations — may make their own sense differently.

On most of the stuff that’s been said in this thread and the various related ones, I’ve been more aligned with Arkay than Nic. But on this, the point of their most heated disagreement, I think they’ve both got a grasp of something important.

I agree, and that’s why I mentioned survivor-driven response in my last posts, as that’s as fundamental to my philosophy and ethics as is the belief that what one says can and can’t be done to their body must always be respected, and if someone has said they don’t want something done to their body sexually and another transgresses that boundary, I will always stand on the side of calling that the violation that it is. And I believe that in defending that line I *am* aligning myself with the survivor, the victim, or the *acted upon*, as that individual, be they a hypothetical Party B or a fictional character or someone close to me, is the one who set the rules as to what they did or didn’t want done. Saying that someone doing that thing is rape has inherent survivor support and *does* fit each case individually, as in each individual instance the individual him- or herself is the one who has set those limits, has defined their boundaries.

And I will continue to argue, should this thread continue, that there is real harm done in muddying these waters.

As I see it, the crux of this debate was about whether or not a universal standard of sexual assault should always take precedence over a sound-minded individual’s conflicting characterization of their own experience, whether the same standard can be effective both legally and ethically, and whether or not that universal standard is threatened (and what the ramifications might be) if the answer is no.

Exploring these questions is, to me, more like “filtering the waters” than “muddying” them. And it seems like a very natural response to the Assange case in which two progressive paradigms collided rather unpleasantly, suggesting some urgency in negotiating a working relationship between them.

I strongly predict the sorts of questions suggested here are going to emerge with much greater frequency in coming years and that all sorts of accepted ideas about how we secure human rights in an arguably lawless world will need to be actively re-negotiated in light of what increasingly looks like emergent fascism and the subsequent impossibility of depending on its institutions.

One last thing – I came across this recently. It is something Assange said in his TED talk this summer. All else aside, I am basically floored by the negative resonance between this quote and where Assange now sits. Whoever has neutralized this man (meaning a nefarious outside party or the man himself) has hit him in the place that presumably hurts most.

“Capable, generous men do not create victims, they nurture victims…But there is another way of nurturing victims which is to police perpetrators of crime.” – Julian Assange July 2010

“As I see it, the crux of this debate was about whether or not a universal standard of sexual assault should always take precedence over a sound-minded individual’s conflicting characterization of their own experience, whether the same standard can be effective both legally and ethically, and whether or not that universal standard is threatened (and what the ramifications might be) if the answer is no.”

You, as an outside observer with no way of knowing the alleged victim in question, decided that what happened to her doesn’t “sound like rape.” All the, sorry to say, *pseudointellectual* posturing in the world does not change this, especially considering that what we know from people who actually know the alleged victim in question is that she considers sex without a condom unthinkable. When you declare that something that is *clearly* and by definition non-consensual to not really look like rape, you are doing harm. You are making it harder for future survivors to choose, should they want to, to call what happened to them rape, and you are legitimizing the beliefs of those who always blame the alleged victim first.

No one is dictating what someone should call their experience. Your criticisms of the legal aspects are just weak beyond belief and do not apply to replicable circumstances in jurisdictions other than Sweden. Yes, it looks in this case as though these women went to the police for one purpose and the police decided that what happened to the particular alleged victim in question was rape, whether she saw it that way or not. That choice on behalf of that particular state is not relevant to the wider discussion of how we define rape in order to prevent rape, and these are not two progressive paradigms in conflict — the phenomenon that has arisen around this is one of people either never having learned about or actively selling out one belief — that of some manner of consent being necessary for sex — in order to privilege other beliefs. I do not have to do away with one idea to support another belief, and believe me that when you insist in this case on chipping away at consent and what it means you are privileging one thing over another at the expense of many, many people.

We have to have some sort of standard for what rape is if we are to prevent rape, and non-consensual sexual acts imposed by one person on another is a pretty sound standard. One can experience such a thing and not consider it rape, for for the sake of preventing rape and upholding body autonomy, having a firm ethical line is quite important. I maintain that you are making largely unintelligible arguments here.

I have no idea what purpose that quote from Assange is supposed to serve in this discussion. I also don’t think he is “neutralized” or that a person can act in ways that are contrary to the way they would present themselves. Misogynistic beliefs and acts by leftist heroes is a mainstay of anti-oppression movements.

As far as hitting him in the place where it presumably hurts most, I would suggest that this is not a place that hurts him most or he would not be declaring Sweden to be “the Saudi Arabia of feminism” or spreading lies about radical feminism being a war on men, which is essentially how he has comported himself in the past few weeks. A person who believes in gender equality and victims rights would not so easily sell out these things for his own defense.

As someone who has spent actual time around Assange I would suggest that his self-interest and ego seem to come first. This is of course just an anecdotal observation, but I find it funny that anyone would consider that anything in that quote truly represents things that, when hit, might hurt him most. His recent comments regarding this case suggest that he is not actually situated in such a place so much as he is in a place of self-promotion.

And I believe that promoting Wikileaks is important too and am not denouncing his efforts to publicize it. I would just suggest that pure altruism was never his goal, only his advertisement for a variety of goals, some good, some fairly self-serving.

Also I have to say that whether we’re considering the legal term, an ethical standard, or something else, there will always be a need to define what is consensual and what is not and hinging things on what various parties might label something or how efficacious it is to extend that label across contexts or creating a “universal standard of sexual assault” is missing the very large point that there will always be a need to define a non-consensual sexual act as *something*, to define what consent is and, by the act of defining it, what “non-consensual” is. This is not about the universal standard of sexual assault; it is about what is consensual and what is not. The issue is body autonomy and the act of ignoring it to one’s ends, not the term used to describe it, or its legal definition, or “universal standards” or anything else. Throw out the word “rape” and you still have the act of non-consensual sexual acts on another’s body. This will *always* be central to any debate. And by definition it will vary from case to case because *consent* is unique in each case, is an individual decision.

This all applies to my objection to your statement about how what we know of the Assange case is “dark” but “not rape,” because if you throw out the term rape itself or even the idea of applying some sort of standard you are still saying that a by-definition non-consensual sexual act does not look like a “non-consensual sexual act.”

And with that I am truly done with engaging your sophistic fake-intellectual thought experiments.